The present invention relates to the electrical, electronic, and computer arts, and more specifically, to address databases.
Electronic navigation systems specify streets and roads in terms of geographical coordinates of their endpoints and intersections with other streets and roads. The electronic navigation systems develop directions between origin and destination street addresses based generally on traversing a sequence of road-and-street geographical coordinates that form a shortest route between the geographical coordinates of the input origin and destination street addresses. Thus, in order to obtain the geographic coordinates of the origin and destination street addresses (“geocoding”), the electronic navigation systems rely on address databases that correlate geographic coordinates to street addresses. These address databases also are useful for other purposes, e.g., demographic data collection, marketing campaigns, epidemiology, etc.